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What is New in Rational Integration Tester 8.5.0

Product Documentation


Abstract

Read about the new features and enhancements in IBM Rational Integration Tester, IBM Rational Performance Test Server and IBM Rational Test Virtualization Server that were added in version 8.5.0 (released in June 2013).

Content

The user documentation has been converted from PDF files to the Rational Integration Tester Knowledge Center. For information about setting up the knowledge center, see Using the help.


Globalization

  • Rational Integration Tester has been enhanced to provide full support for Unicode character sets. This means that project resources, messages (and files) containing Unicode characters will be correctly sent, received, and processed, and that Rational Integration Tester can use directories containing Unicode characters. Host names are correctly translated to and from Unicode according to the standard approach.
  • A Rational Integration Tester project results database must be configured correctly to ensure that project resources (for example, test suites) and messages containing Unicode are stored successfully. Oracle, IBM DB2, and MySQL databases must be set up in Unicode mode. Microsoft SQL Server databases must be set up to use the nvarchar type instead of the varchar type. The Microsoft SQL Server database schema creation script that is provided with Rational Integration Tester will create an nvarchar based database. For Oracle, DB2, and MySQL, refer to installation information for Rational Integration Tester to determine how to put the database into Unicode mode.
  • Rational Integration Tester and Rational Test Control Panel have been translated into 14 languages (alongside English). Rational Integration Tester will start using your selected operating system automatically if a translation is available in that language. Rational Test Control Panel will render web pages in a language based on the language details provided by your web browser, which is usually the language of your operating system.
  • Industry standard terms, such as SWIFT and Java type names, have deliberately not been translated. System messages intended to be read by IBM Support, for example, exception stacks, have not been translated. All error messages have been given a unique code, which will be displayed in a Western alphabet to aid IBM Support.

Platforms and standards
  • Rational Integration Tester now supports Microsoft Windows 8.
  • Rational Integration Tester now supports floating licenses on AIX (32 and 64 bit).
  • Support for SSL connections has been added to the TCP/IP transport. This enables Rational Integration Tester to connect to TCP/IP services over SSL, to virtualize a service that uses SSL, and to record (plain text) messages that are being sent over SSL by using the HTTP/TCP proxy.
  • Support has been added for Microsoft .Net 4.5 serialized objects in messages. This enables Rational Integration Tester to publish and receive .Net 4.5 objects that have been serialized on to a supported transport. This functionality requires a .Net 4.5 or later installation on the computer where Rational Integration Tester or Rational Integration Tester Agent is installed, and you must ensure that the .Net software is configured correctly.
  • The ASC X12 schemas supplied with Rational Integration Tester have been updated to the 6040 (January 2012) versions.
  • Rational Integration Tester, Rational Performance Test Server, and Rational Test Virtualization Server now have an IBM Knowledge Center. PDF manuals and Eclipse Help files documentation, release notes in PDF format, are no longer supplied with the software.
  • Rational Integration Tester (client application) is now supported on OS X. Rational Integration Tester proxies, Rational Test Control Panel (server side), and Rational Integration Tester agents are not supported on OS X. The functionality of Rational Integration Tester on OS/X is limited because some third party applications do not provide client JAR files for the operating system.
  • Rational Integration Tester support for WS-Security encryption has been improved significantly:
    • WS-Security headers can now be encrypted on publish.
    • Stubs and subscriber actions can decrypt SOAP messages that are encrypted with WS-Security (assuming that keystores are configured correctly configured). This means that it is now possible to virtualize services that receive and must respond with WS-Security encrypted messages.
    • With appropriate configured keystores, it is now possible for Recording Studio to decrypt WS-Security encrypted messages automatically and to present the plain text content to users as they are recorded.
  • Rational Integration Tester now supports all of the UN/EDIFACT schema dictionaries. UN/EDIFACT (United Nations rules for Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport) is a set of international standards, directories, and guidelines for the electronic interchange of structured data. Earlier releases of Rational Integration Tester supported a subset of dictionaries using an older technology. Rational Integration Tester 8.x still supports the older technology but this support will be removed from future releases of Rational Integration Tester and it should not be used to build new tests. The newer schema, UN EDIFACT, supports dictionaries up to D11B. The older schema, EDIFACT/ISO 9735, has only A dictionaries to 2006.

Virtualization
  • You can now use Rational Integration Tester to intercept, record, and virtualize Java method calls. This enables you to virtualize services when middleware technology is unavailable or too expensive to acquire, or when other Rational Integration Tester virtualization capabilities do not support a particular middleware technology.
  • It is now possible to record and virtualize calls from one IBM CICS program to another when they are accessing each other by means of the distributed program link (DPL) technology. This enables anyone testing CICS programs to create virtual services that represent downstream CICS programs and thus simplify test environments, or to test when CICS programs are not yet available. CICS DPL virtualization is available on CICS V4.2 and V5.1. To use this feature, a patch must be installed on the CICS system:

  • http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1PM88786 (CICS V4.2)
    http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1PM88787 (CICS V5.1)
  • You can now virtualize an IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL database accessed by means of JDBC without requiring a second schema of the same database type. This is achieved by selecting the integrated simulation database option when creating a database stub. This option uses a database built into Rational Integration Tester or Rational Integration Tester Agent and enables virtualization of non-vendor-specific database access (tables and stored procedures). Stubs built using this option still maintain database state and can be edited just like normal database stubs. If you need to virtualize database access that uses vendor-specific SQL, the alternative second schema approach will still provide the best overall experience.
  • When creating a performance test in Rational Integration Tester, it is now possible to select stubs to run from Rational Test Control Panel in the same way that you can for test suite scenarios. When the performance test starts, the stubs will be started on Rational Test Virtualization Server agents. When the performance test stops, the stubs will also be stopped. You also have the option of locking the Rational Test Control Panel environment for the duration of the performance test.

IBM Rational Quality Manager
  • In the Rational Integration Tester and Rational Quality Manager integration, execution parameter passing has been enhanced. You can chain together multiple integration tests in Rational Quality Manager so that the output of one test can be input into another test. You can manage parameters by using the Rational Quality Manager user interface. When you are executing tests on agent computers, you can send input parameters and receive output parameters. You can set parameter passing for single tests or for multiple tests.
  • It is now possible to configure a Rational Integration Tester Agent such that it can be used by multiple Rational Quality Manager projects to run tests. In earlier releases, an agent was required for each Rational Quality Manager project.

IBM System z
  • Sift and pass through technology is now available for virtual services based on the interceptor-based message redirection for IBM WebSphere MQ queue managers running on System z. This technology, which was introduced for the distributed WebSphere MQ platform in Rational Integration Tester 8.0.1, enables virtual services to run at the same time as the real service. Sift and pass Through technology ensures that the virtual service will always get the message first and can determine whether to process it or allow it to "pass through" to the live service. This enables you to build more sophisticated stubs that can delegate to the live service if the message is not relevant to a test case.
IBM WebSphere
  • Synchronization between WebSphere Application Server and Rational Integration Tester is now supported:
    • If HTTP-based web services are synchronized, operations are created during the synchronization.
    • If Java message service (JMS), WebSphere MQ, or database sources are synchronized, logical and physical transports are created during the synchronization.
  • WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment environments are now supported for synchronization and for JDBC database virtualization setup.
  • Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document synchronization with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository synchronization is now supported. Rational Integration Tester can search for WSDL documents in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository instances. This enables you to synchronize these WSDL documents into a Rational Integration Tester project or to add the WSDL documents directly to the schema library of a Rational Integration Tester project.
  • Synchronization between WebSphere Message Broker and Rational Integration Tester is now supported. Rational Integration Tester users can now synchronize against a WebSphere Message Broker instance and populate the logical and physical models of a Rational Integration Tester project with message flows that use the following node categories:
    • WebSphere MQ
    • HTTP
    • Web services
  • The sift-and-pass-through functionality of Rational Integration Tester now works with clustered WebSphere MQ queue managers (distributed platform).
  • Operations and send request actions defined against a WebSphere MQ transport now support WebSphere MQ dynamic reply queues (for send request/receive reply message exchange patterns). Selecting this option causes Rational Integration Tester to tell WebSphere MQ to create a dynamic reply queue for the response. This queue name is passed automatically to the service, which will then respond into this queue. The paired receive reply option in the test will subscribe automatically to the dynamically created queue for the response.
  • Rational Integration Tester now supports WebSphere MQ 7.5 for testing and virtualization. Library Manager now includes WebSphere MQ 7.5 as a predefined option. Currently, although interceptor-based recording on a distributed WebSphere MQ 7.5 queue manager is not officially supported, a number of IBM customers have used the WebSphere MQ 7.1 version of the interceptor successfully.
  • WebSphere MQ interceptor-based recording is now supported on the following IBM AIX® configurations:
AIX version, architectureWebSphere MQ 7.1WebSphere MQ 7.0
5, 32-bitYesNo
5, 64-bitYesNo
6, 32-bitYesYes
6, 64-bitYesYes
7, 32-bitYesYes
7, 64-bitYesYes

Note: Different versions of the interceptor are required for each version of WebSphere MQ and each AIX architecture (32-bit or 64-bit) and the correct interceptor must be used.

DevOps/Continuous integration
  • Rational Test Control Panel now offers an OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) interface, which can be used by other applications to discover, stop, and start stubs. Rational Quality Manager 4.03 has built-in support for this OLSC interface, so Rational Quality Manager users can use Rational Test Control Panel to discover virtual services associate those stubs services with assets in Rational Quality Manager. Rational Quality Manager will then use the OSLC interface to start the stubs automatically. For example, Rational Quality Manager can be configured to start a set of stubs at the beginning of a series of tests to provide virtual services against which the test cases can run.

HP Quality Center
  • A new type of integration between Rational Integration Tester and HP Quality Center 11 offers significant performance improvements over the previous integration when running Rational Integration Tester tests from Quality Center. When you define the test environment to use for test execution, you can now define the test execution method (running Rational Integration Tester instance where you base the test run on a specified Rational Integration Tester project, or command line) and log level settings (off, severe, warning, info, debug) to decrease run time and to provide only the desired level of log information.

Usability enhancements
  • In the Recording Studio perspective of Rational Integration Tester, you can now use Find to search message bodies in Recording Studio. This enables you to identify quickly a message (based on content that you know is in the message body) when creating tests or stubs from recorded messages. This is particularly useful when working with the Java virtualization functionality included in Rational Integration Tester 8.5.0 because a large number of method calls may be recorded during each recording session.
  • As part of the Unicode compliance improvements, record layouts have been enhanced. In earlier releases, all record layouts assumed that strings were ASCII based and thus unsuitable for working with Unicode. There are now three types of record layout:
    • All record layouts created in earlier releases of Rational Integration Tester will be assumed to be of type ASCII. With ASCII, a character is assumed to always be one byte. You should not use this type to create new record layouts unless you are certain that messages to which the record layout will be applied will always be in ASCII.
    • The string type allows you to define only character-based elements. All record position/lengths are defined in terms of the number of characters, not the number of bytes. This enables Unicode characters (which are of varying byte lengths) to be used consistently within a record layout.
    • The byte type does not allow character-based elements to be defined. All positions and lengths are defined in terms of byte positions. Characters/strings are not allowed, so Unicode has no meaning for this type.

    • In addition, you can now assign a namespace to a record layout. This provides for grouping in the Schema Library view of the Architecture School perspective and also enables you to set up rules in the Rule Cache that will apply only to specific record layouts.
    • The user interface controls of Rational Integration Tester 8.5.0 have been upgraded. Although the overall level of functionality of the user interface has not changed, there are some visual changes and switching between perspectives is now faster.

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Document Information

Modified date:
29 September 2018

UID

swg27044125